Digital media players of various types have proliferated, aided by the wide availability and increasingly low cost of high-density memories and processing power. Both dedicated media players and general-purpose computing devices, as well as hybrid devices such as playback-capable cellular telephones, are commonly used to organize and play media content such as music and videos. It is often convenient to organize such content into playlists, which permit specification of a set of media elements to be played or synchronized and in some cases an order in which to play them.
Tags are an increasingly popular way to organize assets such as email, web pages and photos. Tagging allows users to organize their content in ways that make sense to the user, without requiring a fixed structure or taxonomy. Tags can be user-generated, and are also increasingly available from network-accessible services and as metadata associated with digital media.
Current technologies provide for playlist generation and maintenance on the basis of adding individual media elements or elements based on an associated artist, album, etc. However, they do not provide for using tags when creating or maintaining playlists. This restricts users from being able to use convenient, personalized and unstructured organizational tools for their playlists, resulting in difficulty and wasted time.
Accordingly, it would be useful to be able to create and maintain playlists including the use of tags.